NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime (Sport and Society)

NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime (Sport and Society) by Crepeau, Richard C.. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780252080203.

This wide-ranging history synthesizes scholarship and media sources to give the reader an inside view of the television contracts, labor issues, and other off-the-field forces that shaped the National Football League. Historian Richard Crepeau shows how Commissioner Pete Rozelles steady leadership guided the leagues explosive growth during the era of Monday Night Football and the Super Bowls transformation into a mid-winter spectacle. Crepeau also delves into the leagues masterful exploitation of media from radio to the internet, its ability to get taxpayers to subsidize team stadiums, and its success in delivering an outlet for experiencing vicarious violence to a public uneasy over the changing rules of masculinity. Probing and learned, NFL Football tells an epic American success story peopled by larger-than-life figures and driven by ambition, money, sweat, and dizzying social and technological changes.